In recent years, object audio technologies are in use in movies, games, and so on and coding schemes that can handle object audio have also been developed. For example, the MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group)-H Part 3: 3D audio standard that is an international standard is known as a standard related with the coding of object audio (refer to NPL 1 below, for example).
With an encoding scheme as mentioned above, as with the related-art 2-channel stereo scheme and multi-channel stereo schemes such as the 5.1-channel, moving audio sources and so on can be handled as audio objects so as to encode, as metadata, the positional information of audio objects along with the signal data of the audio objects. This arrangement facilitates the easy manipulation of a particular sound source at the time of reproduction that has been difficult to practice with related-art encoding schemes. To be more specific, this arrangement allows the volume adjustment and the addition of effects for each audio object as the manipulation of a particular sound source, for example.